A swarm of upcoming superhero films—Captain America, The Avengers, Green Lantern, another Superman reboot, a new Batman epic, blah, blah, yawn—will fill the steroidal void with special effects. Amid this Götterdämmerung of boys with toys, Broadway’s Spider-Man fiasco may be the only show with balls.
Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … a flocking mess! Gridlock conditions have hit the superhero genre, clogging the metropolitan skies, Imax screens, and creative arteries. Pre-emptive fatigue is the only reasonable reaction to the next slate of doomsday scenarios being death-rayed out of the dream factories—battlefield earth has been saved so often from evil-baddie destruction and criminal anarchy that it’s a wonder the planet doesn’t look like a spat-out peach pit by now. How far can Hollywood rummage through the costume bin before the only thing left is Wonder Woman’s training bra? Earlier this year came the clamor of The Green Hornet, a 3-D exercise in retro chic which certified that Seth Rogen’s hip brand of smoked ham is as under-amped for crime-busting action as James Franco’s was for Oscar hosting duties. This runaway lawn mower was directed by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), who probably told himself that dusting off a pop icon would make for a stylish romp, the sort of thing you tell yourself before falling from the trapeze. In the coming months and near-distant future, the thundering clouds will belch forth Thor, the tale of the hammer-whirling Norse god with the golden tresses and a lungful of “By Odin’s beard!” exclamations (the director is Kenneth Branagh, whose Shakespearean background well equips him to handle shouty dialogue in windy conditions); X-Men: First Class (directed by Matthew Vaughn), a prequel set during the high noon of the Cuban missile crisis, whose cast includes January Jones as a mutant who can transform herself into a diamond figure, which seems redundant; Captain America: The First Avenger, based on the hero who was created in 1941 by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon; and The Avengers—with Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, Chris Evans’s Captain America, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, and, so that it isn’t all pecs up there, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. A new Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) will be web-slinging from building to building next year, Iron Man 3 is set for 2013, Mayan apocalypse permitting, and there’s talk of an Ant-Man movie to be directed by Edgar Wright, whose Scott Pilgrim vs. the World had fanboys and film bloggers doing a Snoopy dance of delight. This could be a dicier proposition, however. Ant-Man, with his antenna’d helmet, was never someone that comic-book diehards considered a heavy slugger. Saturday Night Live scholars will recall that it was Ant-Man who was ragged on at the superheroes cocktail party by Dan Aykroyd’s Flash and John Belushi’s Hulk for his puny powers. “Ant-Man, huh? Where are your ants?” “They’re at home, in the ant farm.”
For old-school comic fans such as myself (who had a letter published in the Stan Lee-Jack Kirby Fantastic Four in 1967—top that, Jonathan Franzen), these cinematic blowup editions are lacking on the fun side. The more ambitious ones aren’t meant to be much fun, apart from a finely crafted quip surgically inserted here and there to defuse the tension of everybody standing around butt-clenched and battle-ready, waiting for some laureled thespian (Anthony Hopkins as Odin in Thor) to elocute and class up this clambake. Even the films that play it loosey-goosier, such as the facetious Ghost Rider (Nicolas Cage as a skull-blazing vigilante who chills by listening to the Carpenters), end up laying it on too heavy, faking orgasm like a porn star trying to keep Charlie Sheen’s attention. For all of the tremendous talent involved and the technical ingenuity deployed, superhero movies go at us like death metal: loud, anthemic, convoluted, technocratic, agonistic, fireball-blossoming, scenery-crushing workloads that waterboard the audience with digital effects, World War IV weaponry, rampant destruction, and electrical-flash editing. Like the James Bond revivals with Daniel Craig, they’re endurance tests with obstacle-course stuntwork and a black-piano gloss. Too much money is riding on each start-up or franchise installment to accommodate the air cushion that buoyed the romantic wonder of Christopher Reeve-Margot Kidder flights in Superman, the ironies of Gene Hackman as shiny-scalped evildoer Lex Luthor, scoring laughs with one layup sarcasm after another. The arousing sexuality of Ornella Muti slinking around in a catsuit in Flash Gordon (1980) was answered by Michelle Pfeiffer’s full-bodied meow as Catwoman in Batman Returns (1992), but since then it’s been mostly toys for boys on a Gtterdämmerung scale. It’s as if the superhero genre went all-in with steroids, which bulk the muscles and ramp up the aggro but shrink the dangly bits, making them easier to sausage into the Speedos of freedom.
Why so much overcompensation? The superhero genre is an American creation, like jazz and stripper poles, exemplifying American ideals, American know-how, and American might, a mating of magical thinking and the right stuff. But in the new millennium no amount of nationally puffing ourselves up can disguise the entropy and molt. Despite the resolute jaw of Mitt Romney and John Bolton’s mustache, American exceptionalism no longer commands the eagle wingspan to engirdle the world and keep raising the flag over Iwo Jima. Since Vietnam, whatever the bravery and sacrifice of those in uniform, America’s superpower might hasn’t been up to much worthy of chest-swelling, chain-snapping pride (invading a third-rate military matchstick house such as Iraq is hardly the stuff of Homeric legend), and our national sense of inviolability took a sucker punch on September 11, 2001, that dislocated our inner gyroscope. Sinister arch-villains make for high-stakes showdowns, but asymmetrical conflict has no need for them, and for all we know the cavern voice of Osama bin Laden could be a Mission: Impossible tape, poofing into smoke at the first shaft of sunlight. The subsequent War on Terror is one waged within a shadow maze of misdirection and paranoia where the enemy might be no more than a phantom army of apprehensions, viral bugs invading the neural network. The movie that mirrors this post-millennial letdown isn’t a movie at all, but Julie Taymor’s Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, savaged and mocked for months by just about everyone with Internet access or a tin can connected to Michael Riedel at the New York Post. It was an imperfect effort, to understate matters madly. Act I can’t get out of its own way, but Act II was a discordantly compelling mélange of postmodern media theory and Jungian psychology, of Guy DeBord’s Society of the Spectacle and the Buddhist tales of Mara (who unthrones reason and serenity with frightful phantasms). The reign of terror that rocked the skyscraper city was nothing more than demonic images projected by the Jumbotrons of mass illusion, a scarifying paroxysm of pixels like the nerves thrown in patterns on a screen in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Spidey’s nemeses strutting down the runway weren’t real super-baddies but holograms woven from imagination, our worst foes being manufactured fears. The haphazard storytelling of Spider-Man the musical muddled Taymor’s vision-idea, but at least there was an idea here to muddle, which is more than most superhero movies have. It beats hanging around the ant farm.